Organization 2020 - an empirical study of the current and future importance of organizational issues for horticultural companies and their perceived competence in Germany

Structural change, the increasing concentration of industry, and environmental issues are changing the competitive landscape in German horticulture. As in other fields of corporate management the priorities of organizational design are constantly changing. The aim of the present study is to identify issues which will characterize organizational design in the future from the perspective of decision-makers in German horticultural companies, to identify overarching trends and to capture the currently perceived competence of the decision-makers in different fields, as well as their past experience. The study specifically aims to indicate issues where a gap between future importance and perceived competence is present. For this purpose more than 150 entrepreneurs and executives from horticulture participated in an online survey in 2014. Most participants in the study were from ornamental horticulture, tree nurseries and vegetable farms. The main finding was that soft issues such as employee-motivation/employee-engagement/empowerment and the design of corporate-culture are approximately 50% more often considered one of the five most important organizational issues in 2020 than hard issues such as general cost-reduction and restructuring. Moreover, there is a critical gap in the perceived competence in future issues such as the optimization-of-leadership-levels, and issues that are already of substantial importance, such as the design-of-corporate-culture and performance-management. A significant positive relationship was observed between self-evaluated economic-success and today’s subjective importance of optimization-of-leadership-levels, innovation-management and project-management. According to the participating horticultural companies, there is a perceived need for action, especially in the soft subjects: organization-of-the-corporate-culture, cross-divisional-collaboration/cooperation-behavior, leadership and process-management.